One Legendary Campaign and all Intels and Skulls later, I am quite ready to give you my review of Halo 5 Guardians.
I will give you three major pros, three lesser pros, three major cons and three lesser cons. I’ll see if this classification will help me, and you, understand best the priority of what I think are the major points in my review.
So let me start this bit of a reading.
Halo 5: Guardians.
Overall Short Review: This time, 343i did things right. They nailed it, and produced a major game that finally shows off what that studio is able to do.
There is still room for improvement, especially in some parts that I’m going to address below, and generally, they fucked up in most of the other parts of the lore, most importantly the abrupt ending of the Didact in that horrible, obnoxious plot device that is Escalation.
So I have fears, major fears that they will eventually end this saga again in that horrible way, but it is my deepest hope that they will not, and, in the oh-so-remotely-improbable-and-unrealistic possibility that they will read this, I beg you, do not end this off-screen. Do not end this in a Spartan-Ops-esque thing; end this in Halo 6.
Major Pro 1: The Music. I cannot stress this enough, a videogame is made for the 60% of it by its soundtrack. This time, 343i has been spot-on with the astounding soundtrack that was given to Halo 5.
Halo is Halo because of its soundtrack. If any of you are not aware of this, just take Halo: CE and replace the soundtrack completely, no chorus chants, no drum roll, no pale horses, and see how that plays.
The reason I am going to give this game a high review score is mostly due to its music, the improvement from Halo 4’s more “electronic” version (pardon my imprecise musical terminology, but you get what I mean) of the original, beloved score.
As of this writing, I’m listening to Halo 5 ost (link here), and it just makes everything better. As I already said and won’t ever tire to say, having a great music will appease for other mistakes.
Major Pro 2: The Story. I have read around the internet that there are dissatisfactions over the story component about the missed “hunt”, the conflict that supposedly never happened between Locke and Master Chief.
I beg to disagree. You see, if you think that, it’s because you let the hype take the better of you and believed that every trailer was to be part of the actual story. The problem is that this has never, ever happened before.
Think of the Halo 3 teaser “Starry Nights”. Or the Halo 2 E3 Campaign demo. Heck, think of the E3 2000 announcement trailer for Halo: Combat Evolved. Had CE Dinosaur-like creatures in it?
They were a lie! A lie indeed, and what has Hunt the Truth taught us? Wasn’t this the whole point of listening to HTT’s podcasts? To uncover the truth among overwhelming lies?
I have approached the game with the slightest hype possible (and yet, I was pretty excited), expecting something on the level of Halo 4.
It turned out to be better than the highest expectation I had. When Locke and Chief had the showdown, when they started punching the shit out of each other, I understood that I was playing a defining chapter in the history of Halo.
And the finale...I had this remote hope, that they would end it with a cliffhanger (because people, Halo 2’s ending was one of the best endings the gaming history will ever have, believe it or not), and when it happened - and what a cliffhanger! - it gave me goosebumps. The Legendary ending...when you think the game couldn’t get any better, it is nice to be proven wrong.
Major Pro 3: The Characters. Seeing the Arbiter back in action again, with its shiny fancy-schmancy golden armor on, is a pleasure to the eyes. Although the italian version has changed dubber, sadly, the character remains who he is: a fucking badass. As of now, the Arbiter ended the Covenant twice. Take a moment to metabolize that.
Finally getting some screen action of Blue Team surely is satisfying, but having Buck on your time is just the best I could’ve hoped for. While no one else on Osiris has me attached to them nor gives me a fond character (I had preferred Locke to be a faceless hunter, but that would’ve worked well only if they had been lone wolves), Buck brings with him all of the feelings I experienced during ODST. Nathan Fillion once again stroke right at my heart.
Lesser Pro 1: The Levels. Halo 4’s levels were all the same: get there, push this button. Find me a level that didn’t have that objective recurring over and over again.
This time however things got changed, and levels are now way more open to different tactics, some forced on us while others completely made up by the player. Furthermore, they hit again on the landscapes, which were cool in Halo 4, and they are awesome in Halo 5.
Lesser Pro 2: The Weapons. Forerunner weapons have now a sense - at least gameplay-wise, we’re still far from being useful against the Flood - and are sometimes worth to give them a shot for the sake of it. The sounds are quite good too, but that’s been the same for Halo 4.
Lesser Pro 3: The Team. Although I have strong concerns against how the AI performed during the game, being able to be revived, to redirect your teammates to pick up weapons and use them against turrets and such, to use them as cannon fodder was something I have appreciated, as it made Legendary less difficult (something I’ve come to appreciate only lately, when work took the most of my time).
Major Con 1: Explosions and Particles. I can’t understand how we’ve passed from Halo Reach’s explosions (or Halo 3, that now has 9 years) to these horribly-awkward (and that’s a huge euphemism) explosions and firing effects. What once was a 3D rendered effect, is now a 2D effect, with two layers intertwined between them in order to give it profundity. That. Does. Not. Work. At. All.
Explosions would be laughable if I had no lacrimating conduits - they make me cringe every time I see one. I really don’t understand if those explosions make someone go “Woohoo!”, and I certainly do not hope so. They almost take away the immersion that I get when playing this game. The fact that a 9 year old game had better explosions in it should give them something to think about, for God’s sake.
Major Con 2: The Sangheili. Funny how we see Halo 2-styled Elites with the Arbiter in the epilogue of H2A, and then they got changed to those obscene models post-Halo 4 for no apparent reason. I guess spending some time to put those models in for 5 missions (i.e. half the Campaign) wasn’t worth it, right?
It was instead, since they were shown with a model in their main line-up story for this game. Another evidence of 343i’s little care for aspects of the game that do not comprehend 360noscope-multiplayer factors. Because they did build those models for H2A’s multy! How hard was it to bring them as they were into the game?
Inb4 “you’re not a game designer”, the excuse of “not technically possible” is as lame as it could get, just admit you didn’t want to (or didn’t have time to) put them in.
Major Con 3: Co-op. Speaking of technicalities, this one has been, and will be debated about for a lot of time.
I won’t spend words on this, but look: Halo 5 was the lowest selling Halo title EVER. Does this ring any bells to you?
Maybe you should’ve not taken out all that stuff that made Halo be Halo, like, I dunno...Co-op?
But hey, we got plenty of Weapon skins! Some of which alter the way a weapon is used! Glad they had time to work on that aspect!
Lesser Con 1: AI. Teammates are fine as a tool of destruction/revival, but only if ordered to. Left them without commands, they are of no help to you. Sure, commands are fine, but seeing three Spartan II standing one behind one another waiting to revive you, whilst being hit and killed by Grunts is...uhm...depressing?
Lesser Con 2: UNSC Vehicles and Forerunner Pheaton. The UNSC vehicles sadly retained their half-rebooted design that was given to them in Halo 4, with some more horrible and unrequested deformations - Warthog’s turret having six barrels, Scorpion tank with the turret on its center.
Has someone asked for them to change the UNSC design? I had surely not.
And the Pheaton is a weapon that goes up and down, left and right. To call it a vehicle is an aberration; it is merely a semi-moving weapon platform. I’m stoked that hundreds of millennias of Forerunner engineering delivered to that.
Lesser Con 3: Warden Eternal’s decisions. This one is a bit forced (proof that this game is overall good! yay!), but why has the Warden Eternal had to fight Blue Team and Osiris with 1 to 3 bodies at a time? Why not just...stop them with the control of, say, 20 bodies at a time, as happened before Cortana stopped him?
Kind of strange to be the Keeper of the Domain and not wanting to use your full strength when in need of it.
Well that’s it. I had written up to Major Pro 3 before Christmas, then interrupted, but now I did it.
Overall, this game is a major improvement over the past installment, and as I said before, some of its flaws are obscured by its grand soundtrack and return of beloved characters. But we are far, sadly, from being at the level of a Bungie Halo.
Final Rating: 8.8
Feel free to discuss below.
